The Thin Pink Line by Lauren Baratz-Logsted released on May 25, 2004 is available now for purchase.

The Thin Pink Line

By Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.

Copyright © 2004 Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-373-25059-2

Chapter One

"Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?"

Not exactly "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," or "It was the best of times, blah, blah, blah," I'll grant you, but it'll do for my life story.

"Have you become a fuckwit, Jane?"

No, perhaps it's best not to start there for a first impression.

Okay. Let's try this one last time. Deep breath here:

I didn't plan on getting pregnant, I swear, although I am certainly capable of going to great lengths to get what I want. The way I figured it at the time, it was a combination of rare animal passion and manufacturer's error. It does happen, you know. Surely, all of the world's unplanned pregnancies can't be from people silly enough to engage in unprotected sex, can it? Regarding the passion and the error, er, at least that was how things came about the first time I was pregnant ... but then wasn't really.

Perhaps I'd better back up a bit and explain.

You see, Trevor and I had been to yet another friend's wedding that weekend, so of course I was understandably depressed afterward. After all, I wasn't an au courant Singleton or even a much maligned Smug Married, but rather, that lowest of the social lows, an inhabitor and cohabitor of that famed female limbo, an Unholy Unmarried, or UU for short, which looks kind of like a cow's udders when seen on the printed page, but perhaps that's neither here nor there. Anyway, after the wedding, Trevor, being Trevor, since he knew he wasn't ready to ask me to marry him but still wanted to make me feel better, had great sex with me.

It's always amazed me how often heartache and really great sex go hand in hand. From what I hear other women say, I think it must be different for them. Hell, sometimes I think everything must be different for other people. But for me, the more melancholy, the bigger the bang. I mean, if I'm actually happy, then I'm probably eating something and even letting myself enjoy it, and sex is the furthest thing from my mind.

But back to Trevor, great sex and pregnancy.

So there we were, having great post-someone-else's-wed-ding sex, and I was thinking how not only had everyone I knew been getting married lately, but they were even having babies as well, when the thought occurred to me, What if I turned up pregnant? Well, no sooner did the thought occur to me than Trevor hit my high note, prophylactic rubber barrier and all, and the thought flew completely out of my mind.

Until I didn't get my period when it was due three weeks later.

Of course I told my best friend David - pronounced Duhveed - right off the bat.

"But this is great news, is it not, Jane?" David asked in his overly precise English.

David lived upstairs from Trevor and me. Just over the minimum height requirement for the Israeli military, in which he had served - I mean, they all do, right? Israelis, that is - he was a regular spark plug. Given to wearing muscle T-shirts and early eighties-style blue jeans, as far as I could see he was the sole item in the plus column for bringing back Jordache jeans. He also had coils of black hair that, along with his bronzed skin, gave him a Semitic Caesar profile. A former fighter pilot, make that gay fighter pilot, he was now trying to make a go of it as a chef in his own trendy Covent Garden bistro, still in the planning stages.

"In the Israeli military, Jane, you both ask and tell, and you take gays and women and anyone else who can handle an Uzi," he'd once told me over a shared bottle of Burgundy left over from a boeuf bourguignonne that a lover of his had failed to show up to share.

When David suggested that my days-old pregnancy was great news, I found myself agreeing with him. After all, it wasn't as though I had deliberately set out to snag Trevor, but this would certainly do the trick. Trevor was such a Do-Right Dudley that he was sure to marry me.

At the time, I didn't even think about what an actual baby might actually mean.

I also didn't think about the emotional consequences of telling people other than the father before I told the father. This was another one of those things that falls under the heading of I Didn't Plan It That Way, But. In this case, the "but" had to do with how gleefully David had received the news. (And him I'd only told about the news first because Trevor was away on business in Singapore for the week.) Bowled over by how happy my pregnancy had made him, I proceeded to tell a few more people. Oh, I didn't go overboard - well, maybe just a bit - didn't do anything so silly as telling my mother or sister or even the girls at work, but I did tell the Pakistani newsagent down the street ("Here, have some curry - it will bring good luck"), a policeman who helped me jimmy my lock one night when I'd locked my bag in the flat ("You can't be too careful at night now that there's two of you") and the odd stranger or two; so, just enough to give me a taste of how the other half lives. Their combined reactions were enough to make me start to experience a warm glow. I began to feel like, maybe, were I to miss out on being pregnant, that I'd miss the potential for the world to be a rosy place.

Of course, never one to do anything by halves, I started to tail pregnant women. You couldn't really call it stalking, but I did spend the Saturday just prior to Trevor's return trailing every prego I happened to casually encounter, until I finally settled on one who looked so close to delivery that I thought I might be called into service at any moment.

And it was amazing the things I learned! Following my quarry through a heavy doorway, I was surprised to see a man who'd been walking ahead of both of us double back to hold the door patiently for her until she'd squeezed her way through. I was still smiling my surprise when he let the door go just in time to smack me in the face. Apparently, the fact that I didn't have the equivalent of a sack of flour attached to the front of my body rendered me invisible or at least not in need of any courtesy. Oh, well. As I followed her about her rounds that day, it wasn't even so much the common courtesies she was shown that impressed me, although I was damned shocked when the drunken old sot on the tube blearily yielded his seat to her so that she could "rest yer Madonna feet, luv." No, it was more the mere fact that people actually talked to her, all the time; perfect strangers who might step over their own mothers in the gutter kept making comments and asking her questions in the most solicitous manner imaginable: "When're you due? "or" Do you know yet if it's a boy or a girl? "or" Spring babies're always so extra special - just like little sunny angels, they are, "this last from the bleary old sot.

Why, it was as though someone had sprinkled pixie dust all over her! Her existence seemed that enchanted, and I longed to find out if my bout with pregnancy would prove the same.

The only problem was that just as I was on the verge of tell-ing Trevor, who had returned from his trip just in time to partake of the pre-celebratory Sunday dinner that was waiting for him, an odd thing occurred. As I was teetering on the precipice of my new future, while serving up a helping of the blanquette de veau that David had prepared for me to pretend to prepare, I felt an unwelcome twinge of pain in my lower back.

"Fuckfuckfuck, "I swore under my breath, just barely restraining myself from slamming the pot back down on the stove.

"What was that, Jane?"

"Nothing," I informed Trevor, ignoring the twinge. "Just a little back pain."

"Mmm," he said distractedly, still rifling through the post that had accumulated since he'd been gone. "Perhaps you should take some Tylenol?"

"No, that's okay. I'm sure it will pass." I brightened. "Ready to eat?"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Thin Pink Lineby Lauren Baratz-Logsted Copyright © 2004 by Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.. Excerpted by permission.
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